Fellow WWII veterans gone

Like most nonagenarians, I have become used to reading the obituaries of my generation. But two death notices in the past few days led to some reflections.

One was for Dr. Lee Bartlett, longtime employee of the Worcester public school system. I had known him for many years, both as a World War II veteran and as a musician, particularly as leader of singing groups such as the Greendale Men’s Club.

Just a couple of weeks ago, three days before his death, he led that group in a harmonious gig for the senior WISE dinner at Assumption College. He was as lively as ever, moving up and down through the audience with his mike, urging surprised seniors into belting out lines from various old chestnuts. It is hard to realize we will never see him and his joyous smile again.

He and I had another link. Of all the WWII veterans I have met over the past 70 years, he was the only one I have ever known besides me who did some of his time on Shemya Island in the far western Aleutians.

We did not know each other then, because we were there at different times and in different branches of the military. His Army construction group built the 10,000-foot runway on Shemya that our Navy patrol bomber squadron used in our patrols covering the North Pacific fleet. At the meetings of the Aleutian Island veterans, we reminisced about the god-awful storms that periodically rip those dismal isles.

The other death that struck me was that of Sen. Daniel Inouye. I never met him, but I have followed his career for more than 50 years and have admired him almost beyond anyone else.

If you want to know what it is to love America, go to the file on Daniel Inouye.

He was born in Hawaii to immigrant parents who were relocated after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. They and 120,000 more ethnic Japanese, 70,000 of whom were American citizens, were treated like enemy aliens, taken from their homes and businesses and confined to dismal camps far away.

Because of his ethnic background, when Mr. Inouye first tried to enlist he was turned down. When the U.S. changed its policy in 1943, he enlisted in the now famed 442nd Regimental Combat Team, composed entirely of Japanese Americans. That unit underwent some of the fiercest fighting of the war in the battles for Italy.

I haven’t known any WWII vets who claimed to be heroes. I’m sure that Lt. Inouye would brush off any such designation for himself. But if he was not a hero, I don’t know what the term means. I quote from the citation when he was given the Medal of Honor:

“With complete disregard for his personal safety, Second Lieutenant Inouye crawled up the treacherous slope to within five yards of the nearest machine gun and hurled two grenades, destroying the emplacement. Before the enemy could retaliate, he stood up and neutralized a second machine gun nest. Although wounded by a sniper’s bullet, he continued to engage other hostile positions at close range until an exploding grenade shattered his right arm. Despite the intense pain, he refused evacuation …”

He lost his arm in that engagement.

After Hawaii became a state in 1959, Mr. Inouye was elected its first fulltime representative to Washington. In 1962, he was elected its first U.S. senator. He served in the Senate for the next 50 years and, as his ninth term was running out, he was making plans for his tenth. He said he wanted to be a senator when he was 92.

By all accounts, he was as popular with his colleagues in the Senate as with the voters. In 53 years, he never lost an election. When Sen. Robert Byrd died in 2010, Mr. Inouye became the senior senator. And he is probably the only man ever to be given the Medal of Honor, the French Legion of Honor and Japan’s Grand Cordon of the Rising Sun — given in 2011 “for his long and distinguished career in public service.”

I have a special interest in his remarkable career because I was there in California when the infamous Relocation laws were being carried out.

In 1942, a few months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, our unit was billeted in Alameda. California was on edge. Rumors of Japanese submarines in San Francisco Bay and subversive elements up and down the coast were plentiful. When we sailors walked along the streets of San Francisco, people with Asian countenances would whisper to us: “We’re Chinese, We’re Koreans.” Japanese Americans were nowhere in sight.

One day I hitched a ride to Sacramento and listened to the driver talk about the big profits to be made in local real estate “when we get rid of the Japs.”

At that very moment, thousands of Japanese Americans from California were being herded into relocation camps in Wyoming, Montana and elsewhere. They had been forced to sell their homes and businesses at fire-sale prices.

Today I wonder why I didn’t react with indignation. But, like most Americans at the time, I probably shared the belief that the Japanese were somehow aliens and not to be trusted — a belief apparently held by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and California Attorney General Earl Warren. They were the main backers of the relocation.